Are We Ready to Forgive Tonya Harding?

The 2014 Winter Olympics marks the 20th anniversary of the infamous clubbing of Nancy Kerrigan. As the beloved figure skater was leaving a national championship practice session in Detroit, she was assaulted by an unidentified man later determined to be associated with her rival, Tonya Harding. Six weeks later, the ladies' singles figure skating competition at the Lillehammer, Norway Olympics, became one of the most watched television events of all time. Take that, nearly ever Super Bowl ever.

In the years since the attack, the key players have more or less moved on with their lives: Kerrigan retired, married her agent, and started a family. Harding, who was banned from figure skating for life after she admitted to hindering the criminal investigation, would sometimes pop up on the celebrity humiliation scanner (aka a reality TV show), but mostly stayed out of sight. She, too, eventually married (again) and had a child.

The Price of Gold, the Nanette Burstein-directed documentary that premiered on ESPN last month, revisits the incident via footage and interviews with key figures including the case's DA, FBI agents, Kerrigan's coaches and husband, and Harding herself. (Kerrigan does not appear in the film.) And unlike much of the press Harding has received in the intervening decades, it presents the disgraced skater in a more sympathetic light.

Much of the focus is on Harding's many abusive relationships—with her then-husband, Jeff Gillooly, with the sport of figure skating, and with her mother, LaVona Golden. Sandra Luckow, a childhood friend who directed Sharp Edges, a 1986 documentary on the athlete, recalls witnessing LaVona beating her daughter with a hairbrush. Diane Rawlinson, Harding's childhood coach, admitted that the young skater once lost a sponsor as a result of her mother's public abuse. Harding herself addresses the allegations with ambivalence: "She's a good mother, but she's not a good mother," she says.

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But both on and off the ice, Harding was known for her aggressiveness and the towering height of her jumps—especially the vaunted triple axel. It's hard to imagine someone like that being cowed by anyone. Yet domestic violence doesn't happen because a woman is small and weak; it's the result of complex relational dynamics.

Reports of abuse were known at the time of the attack according to Sarah Marshall's new comprehensive analysis of the scandal for The Believer, but the media preferred to render it evidence of Harding's low-class status. Beyond violence, Gilooly seemed to manipulate and control his ex-wife. After her triumphant 1991 season—she won Skate America, the national title, and the silver medal at the world championships—she fired her longtime coach, Dody Teachman. It was under Teachman's tutelage that Harding had mastered the triple axel, but "Jeff had a fit about Dody because Dody did not like him," Harding said in her E! True Hollywood Story.

This sort of puppeteering is not unusual. "I have found that perpetrators rely on a handful of familiar tactics to instill fear and attempt to control their partners," says Rena Staub, a social worker who works with victims of abuse in New York. "These tactics include not only physical and sexual abuse, but also psychological manipulation, isolation from trusted friends and family, and economic abuse."

In a recent Deadspin interview, Gillooly expresses regret over trying to use his ex-wife's skating career for personal profit. "We decided to do something really stupid there, and it ruined her," he says of the scheme. "She'll never be remembered for how wonderful a figure skater she was. She'll be remembered for what I talked her into doing." According to Slate, even if the hitman plot had gone off without a hitch, Harding would never have reached Kerrigan levels of wealth.

It seems that the public is ready to accept a new, more sympathetic narrative about Harding—one that acknowledges her abusive past. But the question of her victimhood and her complicity in the plot to hurt Kerrigan are not necessarily one and the same. At the end of the ESPN documentary, even childhood friend Luckow can't seem to believe that the ex-skater had no involvement in the attack.

After emotionally deliberating the question of whether or not Harding was responsible, Luckow finally answers: "Of course."

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